Five Key Performance Indicators Critical to Your Digital Transformation

If you’re about to embark on a digital transformation of your company’s operations or maintenance strategy, you owe it to yourself and your colleagues to be prepared.

Many managers begin on a digital transformation journey without even identifying what to measure. Maintaining digital transformation KPIs are important to help you manage your journey. Here are some recommendations to keep track of your progress:

•     Percent of reactive work
•     Percent downtime
•     Increased availability
•     Additional revenue
•     Maintenance costs

As the amount of reactive work falls, time and resources will become available to focus on determining how to use predictive data to take proactive maintenance actions. That will lead to less downtime, increased availability and, in turn, lower maintenance costs.

Four key questions to ask

Too many efforts to improve reliability derail because digital champions haven’t answered four basic questions about what they want to achieve—which usually means they can’t justify the investment to executive leadership.

1.     Where are you today in your digital journey?
2.     Where should your digital journey take you?
3.     What’s the benefit of getting you there?
4.     What’s the plan for getting you there?

A recent MIT Sloan School of Management report found only 15% of respondents in a survey of 4,300 managers, executives, and analysts said their organizations have a clear and coherent digital strategy for moving beyond an early stage of digital maturity.

Despite that, expectations are almost always high.

Harvard Business Review reported that 98% of digital leaders expect positive results from digital technologies in the first two years of deployment, but only about a quarter of those companies have agreed on the key performance indicators (KPI) that would be used to track progress in their digital transformation.

Taking ownership

Another major mistake digital champions make is not eliminating the wall separating operations and maintenance.

Operators must be empowered to access and manage asset performance enterprise systems and data flow. They need to be part of the same work management system used by maintenance. If they are, they’ll take ownership of analyzing failures and offer solutions.

It’s all part of the trend away from more expensive and less effective schedule-based maintenance (or worse, reactive) and toward a predictive-based system that lowers costs and is more effective.

Pay special attention to reactive work, which is work that isn’t planned, needs to be addressed immediately, and interrupts the flow of the weekly schedule. An equipment breakdown or environmental and safety issues are prime suspects when it comes to reactive work.

Being proactive about addressing these issues will dramatically cut reactive work and produce the kind of quick results that digital leaders expect to see.

Digital Transformation KPIs

Below are some estimates of the returns companies that adopt an asset performance management (APM) system can expect to see. APM should be part of any digital transformation strategy as it’s a holistic solution that focuses on asset health. The goal of APM is to identify the leading indicators of equipment problems and then fix them before equipment is damaged, minimizing unplanned downtime and unexpected costs. 

GrayMatter, a GE Digital partner, is a technology and consulting company with offices in the U.S. and Canada. Visit graymattersystems.com to learn more about our services.